I've never once had pico add anything to the end of a line unless it was a DOS-format file and then it just replaces carriage returns with linefeeds. I've also never seen vi break long lines. It's just a matter of ease of use; I find using ^K instead of "dd" easier to use to cut a line, and ^U to paste the lines that were cut somewhere else (I have yet to figure out how to cut & paste something with vi), ^R to read in a file, not having to hit a special key to get the keystroke commands, etc. pico is just plain easier.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
The major difference is that I already have 2,000 scripts with "" in them on about five different servers. The developers know to use BBEdit instead of Dreamweaver if the filename ends in.php or.phtml already, so there's no problem there. And besides; I'd rather suck out my own prostate than give in to the whims of programmers who refuse to give PHP as much respect as they do ASP (just search the Dreamweaver help system for "php", then search again for "asp" and compare the results).
Apache runs on over 60% of the world's websites. PHP runs on almost 1.5 million of those sites. The only people who use IIS/ASP/NT servers are big businesses who've been brainwashed into thinking they're more stable, reliable, robust, etc than Unix servers; all the rest of us know better. And some of us refuse to have any trace of any Microsoft product associated with their sites...:')
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
...and since it wasn't a REAL troll, and neither am I, I use pico. vi is not quite as bad as emacs in terms of usability, but it's close. I've yet to find a text editing task that was any easier in vi than in pico. Once you figure out how to keep the damn thing from breaking long lines wherever it feels like, pico rules...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
UGH!!!!!! Put ASP tags into a PHP script??? That's worse than Philip Glass selling out to Pepsi ads. There's no excuse for Dreamweaver destroying PHP tags; if it can recognize ASP delimiters, it can damn sure recognize PHP ones. Just because PHP supports using ASP tags instead doesn't mean I'm gonna go rewrite 2,000 scripts, anyway; I'd much rather use a cheaper HTML editor than pay money for something that's purposely designed to make life difficult for non-Microsoft-zombies...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I have to agree. I've never found it *necessary* to use ODBC for database access except when it has to be used with IIS and ASP (and thus a System DSN is needed). As I mentioned earlier, if a database has been designed and entered in Access or something foreign to all that is holy, export it to flat text and write a small PHP script to parse it and use MySQL calls to do the data entry. People who shop around for months for tools that will do these kinds of things never find what they're looking for; it's always best (and MUCH faster) to just write your own that's customized to your particular task at hand. If you can. If not, I charge $50 an hour... hehehehe...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Point them to a nice little box of Dreamweaver and pray they like it. (As it can play nice with PHP.:))
Every time the web developers here TOUCH one of my PHP scripts with Dreamweaver, it totally destroys it. It can't seem to get it through its little Microsoft-centric mind that not every ">" sign isn't part of an HTML tag... it takes damn near every "?>" and turns it into "<"... but, oh, does it work nicely with ASP.
Use Homesite, BBEdit, or some other plain text editor if you're going to play with PHP.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
As a plug for a favorite product, I'd suggest pointing the designers toward Visio2000 for database design...
And, lo and behold, coincidence of coincidences, Microsoft assimilated... I mean, "bought"... Visio. How long will it be before it'll only design MS SQL or Access databases? Hmmmmmmm.
Oh, not to mention the fact that you'll spend $900 for it.
You know how I design databases? On paper. I draw out everything the database will need, and then using (gasp!) pico, I proceed to write the structure...
create table assimilations (
id int not null auto_increment primary key, company_name varchar(255), assimilation_price float(25,2), ex_CEO varchar(255), new_CEO enum('Bill Gates','Steve Ballmer'), assimilation_date int );
...and then if need be, use a PHP script to do the data entry legwork for me. See how easy it is?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
How does M$.com stay up? It's very simple. They have a bank of servers, some doing work and some just sitting there doing nothing while waiting for the ones doing work to crash; when they do (and they will), the ones that are idle take over... thus, you get the illusion of stability when in fact, their servers are crashing all the time. In other words... IIS is great if you throw enough money at it, don't mind having a 24-hour crew of sysadmins running around hitting the reset buttons on the crashed servers all day every day, and don't mind having to buy twice as many servers as you would need with Apache.
By the way, I recently had need to port an Access database to MySQL, a big list of zip codes which was only distributed as an MDB file. I couldn't find any way to just export a SQL file to import directly into MySQL, so I exported the table as a tab-separated list. The latitudes and longitudes in the database are accurate to 6 decimal places; the ones it exported were only accurate to 3 decimal places, and there's no way to tell it "I want 6 decimal places, damn you." So after wasting hours playing with all the exporting options, I found that if you export it with the "Formatted Report" method, it DOES keep all six decimal places... so I just took that 12-meg file (it puts a line of data, a line of "--------", a line of data, a line of "-------", etc) and wrote a PHP script to parse it and directly insert the values into the database. Worked like a charm.
So you see, there are ways around Microsoft's half-assed programs... I mean, how hard would it be to have "Export as SQL" in the options? Just basic table row data entry is the simplest thing you can do in SQL; it's not like it would have to know whether it's Oracle or MS SQL Server or MySQL or Postgres, for god's sake...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Where'd you get the idea I said Elian's family should have used guns? As for "he should have been taken," he should have... his mother kidnapped him and transported him across the border to another country; the fact that she unfortunately died in the process doesn't change that. If an American mother had taken her child from its father and transported him across even state lines, she'd be a wanted fugitive; soon as she was caught, the child would be returned to its father. How is this any different? Because he's a cute little 5 year old Cuban boy? Please. I was criticizing the raid on their house not on the basis that they should have let the family keep him; it was on the basis that they went in and pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed everyone in the place with no reason. I'm surprised they didn't arrest them all on the spot, but there definitely was no need for chemical spraying; it's just highly demonstrative of the attitude prevalent in the government's enforcement agencies these days: "Rights? You have no rights."
And on to OK City. Read again the things I mentioned about that incident. Explosive devices found in the basement (the ones that *didn't* go off); history records "there was just one bomb in the truck," and that has become "truth" in spite of the fact that people have videotaped news reports stating otherwise. Eyewitnesses insisting there were two explosions close together, not just one as history now records as the "truth" -- also in direct contradiction to videotaped eyewitness testimony. The clear evidence of an outward explosion from within the building (just look at any photograph of the place). Their insistence that the whole building, chock-full of hard evidence, was bulldozed over before anything even approaching a full investigation was done. To me, the evidence that I have seen with my own eyes contradicts and makes impossible everything the government claimed in all of its statements about the event, whether via spokesperson on TV, or in a court of law under oath. But that's hardly surprising, I suppose; if Clinton can get away with perjury, they sure can...
And I don't carry a gun. But random strangers bent on mugging, harming, raping, or killing me don't know that. And if people carrying guns was the norm in this society, they would more than likely keep not knowing that... because they would be far less likely to tempt fate and find out for sure.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Your constitution was written in 1776 when there was a very real threat of a British reinvasion. Well guess what? I think the threat is over.
You need to reread Jefferson's letter. He clearly was not talking about the British when he wrote that.
Now, personally I hate guns. The best thing that could happen would be for all weapons to just suddenly vanish from Earth. But that's not very likely, is it? The cat is out of the bag, Pandora's box is open, there's no way (without a time machine) to get rid of them all. So the only other solution is for everyone to have them so that nobody has an advantage over anyone else. And what if there were no guns, anyway? People would use knives to hurt each other. And if there were no knives? They would throw rocks. No rocks? They'd use their fists. It is perfectly possible to kill someone using your bare hands, no weapons required. If these kids hadn't had access to guns, they would have found something else to retaliate with.
The real solution, the real and only truly lasting solution, is to remove the URGE to kill. Video games, no matter how violent they are, will never *CAUSE* someone to turn into a homicidal maniac. It would be just as valid to say "Well, all these kids who shoot people breathe oxygen; we need to remove oxygen from society to save the children!" Damn near every child in America has played video games; what percentage of them have then killed someone, too? I'll give you a hint: it's a DAMN small percentage. They kill because they were predisposed to killing, not because they played one too many games of Doom. They kill because they feel helpless to change things any other way. They kill because they have the Psychopath Gene. There are a thousand reasons someone might turn into a killer. Video games ain't one of them.
Let's look at the example of Australia. They banned guns a year or two ago. Since then, what has happened? Violent homicides are up over 300%. Why? Because nobody can PROTECT themselves anymore. What if EVERY kid in Columbine High School had been armed that day? Those two boys wouldn't have lasted 5 seconds after pulling out shotguns; they'd have been plastered to the wall by 500 rounds of ammunition shot by every OTHER kid in the place. It's likely nobody ELSE would have died at all!
Everyone says guns are "too accessible." There's no way to make them UNaccessible; if you ban them, there's always the black market. I say, guns aren't accessible enough. If every high school student was given a handgun and trained in how to use it, you would see a dramatic decline in school violence, bullying, and the general nastiness that kids indulge in. Throw a wolf into a flock of sheep and it'll gorge itself on defenseless flesh; give all the sheep guns, and the wolf doesn't stand a chance.
Think about it.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
It's very gratifying to see there are others out there with a clue. I was beginning to think I was the only one who realized that as soon as guns are outlawed and only outlaws have guns, the outlaws will be our only defense against the government corruption that has been running rampant in America almost since its inception.
History lesson: Hitler gains power in Germany and immediately disarms the population. How could the Jews defend themselves then?
People who say things like "Oh, the Second Amendment was only put there so people could hunt for food" are clueless morons. Hunting for your dinner with a rifle was a given back then... if you didn't shoot things, you didn't eat. The entire purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the population would always be able to defend itself against all enemies, FOREIGN OR DOMESTIC. A "domestic enemy" is one that attacks you from within... i.e., the government itself. And we, my friends, have been under attack for centuries.
Wake up, people. Stop believing everything you see on CNN. Let me give you an example: Elian Gonzalez. I saw, live, that pre-dawn raid on the home he was in. I agree that they should have returned him to his father, but not the way they did it. They went in and waved M-16's at everyone, grabbed the kid at gunpoint, and then on their way out, they sprayed everyone in the place with pepper spray and tear gas. You didn't see THAT on the reruns, did you? It only appeared on the LIVE footage and they never mentioned gas or sprays again... but they damn sure showed all the people that were in that house weeping their asses off, trying to give us the impression that they were just upset. Now, if CNN can twist the truth around like that in a case this simple, what's to prevent them from inventing the truth whenever it suits them?
Oh, still don't believe me? How about another example? Remember the Oklahoma City bombing? Sure, who doesn't? But how many people besides me saw it WHILE it was happening? That's the only time you can catch glimpses of the truth. EVERY eyewitness they interviewed said there were TWO blasts, two distinct and separate explosions separated by almost one second. And as if that wasn't enough, CNN itself was reporting that in addition to the truck bomb out in front of the place, they had found FOUR unexploded bombs strapped to the remaining support pillars in the basement! In other words, that truck bomb was a diversion, and the real damage had been done from WITHIN. If you look at the blast damage from just afterwards, it's VERY obvious that that building blew up From The Inside Out. Speculation continues as to what REALLY happened that day and who was really responsible. I'm sure Timothy McVeigh had something to do with it, but (just like Oswald) he and Terry McNichol were patsies. Ask yourselves, also, why they were in such a hurry to bulldoze the place and permanently destroy ALL evidence about anything that happened there? Their pitiful excuses of "It's to minimize everyone's bereavement; out of sight, out of mind" was just that -- a pitiful excuse.
My point? Never believe anything CNN tells you, including "Gun control is the answer to violence! Save the children -- Gun Control Now!" If you ever want to get something banned, just claim (whether true or not) that it threatens children, and if enough people hear and believe it, they'll clamor for its banning until the legislative bodies in question have no choice but to do so or be thrown out of office.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the US government was behind every assassination, every terrorist bombing, every school/church/nursing home shooting, and every other sneaky bit of nastiness in recent history. Not One Bit. Everything that's happened since about 1900 has seemed to be leading towards the government and/or Big Business being in control of All Things. How many of you knew that the US Constitution specifically says, in the Tenth Amendment, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"? Do you know what that means? That means that the STATES in the US are supposed to have more power than the federal government, and should be allowed to decide for themselves all things that aren't *specifically* granted to the Federal government in the constitution. Have you EVER seen the federal government exhibit that behavior? Nooooo. What they do is say "Okay; if you don't enact such-and-such a law, we'll cut off funding for, say, your highways." This is coercion, plain and simple. The federal government is no better than the Mafia telling a shop owner "Yeah, ya needs to pay us 'insurance' to make sure nothin' bad happens to ya..."
Go ahead. Call me a nut. They called Galileo a nut for saying the earth rotates around the sun. They called Columbus a nut for saying the earth was round. They called Louis Pasteur a nut for saying diseases were caused by tiny little invisible creatures that got inside your cells and did bad things. They called Orville and Wilbur Wright nuts for attempting to fly. They called Ben Franklin nuts for flying kites in lightning storms. But no matter how outrageous the claims, they were all right, weren't they?
In case anyone still doubts the opinions of the Founding Fathers and what they had in mind when they wrote the Constitution (and especially with regard to gun control), here's a quote from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Smith on the subject:
"What country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure."
(You can find the whole letter here if you're interested.
Read that quote over and over and over until you understand it completely, and realize what he was saying. We have lost the "spirit of resistance." Our rulers believe us to be the sheep we are, and are taking advantage of it Right Now. Not a day goes by anymore that they don't take away one liberty or another from us, because we LET them take them away. Do we have the courage to "set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them"? Thomas Jefferson knew the truth. The rest of the founding fathers knew the truth too. But somewhere between then and now, something happened and everyone forgot history... so now, we're repeating it, presumably until we get it right.
Let's get it right this time, people... Think Of The Children!:-)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
This could not possibly have "slipped by" code reviewers. You cannot miss something like that key phrase sticking out like that, I don't care how tired you are. The only reason that DLL made it into the final release is because the higher-ups WANTED IT THERE. They KNEW about it, they AUTHORIZED it, and they damn sure aren't going to fire anyone over it unless some VP decides they need a patsy. Their source code may be closed to all of us out here in the bleachers, but internally their engineers would have been all OVER that in a heartbeat... IF they weren't being told to put it in in the first place.
I will never trust a Microsoft product again.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Nobody got me...:) It didn't matter if it was a troll or not, because there are people out there who do think like that and they need to be taught the reasons why the way they feel is wrong. Education is the key to our eventually winning this war against MS and all that it stands for; the post I was responding to was just a handy vehicle for the dissemination of truth.
Fight the power! Thank you. heh.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Erm... I'm sorry, but I have to reply to this one. I'll try not to flame... really...
If you linux users could ONLY connect to the internet like good win9x users you wouldn't need a secure OS.
Anything that connects to the internet has to be secure these days. You just try hooking your Win95/98/00 machine up with a cable modem for more than 6 hours without getting hack attempts from all over the world. If you leave Netbios ports open and have file/print sharing turned on, you might as well just buy a billboard ad along any major freeway and put your machine name, IP address, and administrator password on it. And guess what? Windows (all varieties, all versions) comes with all that crap enabled BY DEFAULT! Yes, MICROS~1 wants your machine to be as secure as a dollar bill blowing gently down a busy sidewalk; there's no other reason why they'd do that.
Windows hardly ever has a problem or a glitch
Okay, now, I know this has to be a troll... it's just too obviously wrong and too easily disproven. Just ask anyone who experiences the BSOD on a daily basis...
that linux version of McAffe-another 3l33t company-only protects again two virii, the Windows version protects against thousands-- what does that tell you huh?
It tells me that a virus running on Linux has as much chance of propagating itself as a really ugly nun. Unless you do everything as root, and run things without knowing what they are AS root, and are just basically an idiot, a virus cannot do much to you... hence, there just aren't that many for Mc3l33t to protect you from.
Windows... isn't near as hard to fix as a Mac...
You've obviously never used a Mac. I have to support and administer them on a daily basis, and trust me; they are just as unreliable and unstable as Windows.
Windows... doesn't require a PHD level education to administer.
Given the number of Windows boxes out there with port 139 open to the entire world (that's your Netbios/File sharing port, by the way), it must take some level of intelligence/education beyond what almost everyone on earth has. At least Linux doesn't install all of its services defaulted to "allow complete strangers in without a password." At least Linux isn't susceptible to virii unless you're an idiot. At least Linux doesn't crash 12 times a day because of all the OS memory leaks and bad file management. At least Linux doesn't cost you a few days' salary. At least Linux doesn't hide any dirty little secrets in its source code. And, at least Linux isn't limited because it's being made by developers who care more about their paychecks and keeping God Mother Bill happy than they do about making something that works, doesn't stifle competition, and doesn't destroy standards in a desperate attempt to be The Most Important and Profitable Thing in the Universe.
Get a current OS, one marked 2000 from a company you can trust...
The last stable Linux version (v2.2.14) has a date stamp of 2000-01-04 19:40 UTC (that's 2:40 PM EST on January 4th, 2000, for the geek-challenged). The latest beta version is from March 24th, 2000, and the latest alpha test version is from yesterday. Can Windows 2000 claim upgrades anywhere near that recent? Last I checked, there are still many many bugs, and no fixes for them. As for trust... I trust an international, non-monetarily- or politically-motivated group of developers who develop things because they LIKE to more than I trust a bunch of copycat programmers who take 5-year-old Windows code and the best ideas of Unix, put a prettier GUI on it, call it "innovation" instead of "assimilation," change world-accepted standards just enough to break everything except Windows platforms, and sell it at a 10,000% profit. Did you know that Windows NT(r) was developed by taking VMS (oh look; 60's technology!) and porting it to the x86 architecture? Did you? Did you know MS hired the guy who originally made VMS to turn it into NT(r)? Hmmm?
So hot grits to you too! Thank you.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Now, now. Don't think that just because our "leaders" here in America are clueless, insane, greedy, bloody idiots that the rest of us are, too. Too often that's the case; guilt by association just doesn't cut it when you're talking about 260,000,000 people being led... err, manipulated... by a few hundred, who are themselves being led by a few tens, who are being led by their own greed and misguided "self-preservation" instincts. Those with the power make the rules. Money is power. And power corrupts. Draw your own conclusions....:)
This is an attitude that is far too prevalent in the world. We barely even get to choose who leads our political world, and have no choice over who leads the financial world, yet many citizens of other countries always pigeonhole every American alive into this "Asshole" category that simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of us -- either because we just aren't assholes, or because we don't have enough power to be assholes. Believe me, if I, or any of the other tens of millions of us who aren't assholes, were in charge, had some power, things would be vastly different. I wonder how I can get myself initiated into the Bilderbergs... now that's power.
So all you terrorists who attack innocent US citizens who just happen to be in, say, Libya are doing nothing that will harm those who are your real targets; all you're doing is taking innocent lives and greatly increasing your chances of being a cockroach in your next few lives. All you people who speak out against "Americans" instead of "greedy capitalists" don't see the full picture; it is not Americans who are grinding you under their bootheels. It is the Nelson Rockefellers, the Bill Klintons, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization who are your real enemies. Fight them... not us.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Sorry... but speaking as one who spent a vast amount of time making such "compilation tapes," it amazes me that I'd forgotten all about them during this hoopla. Yeah, yeah, I know, radio stations pay the record labels for every song they play (pfffft) and that's why it's different........ yeah, yeah....... They're just not happy unless they're bitching about something.
By the way.... you know, I have a lot of MP3s I downloaded that are actually on albums -- that's "vinyl," kiddies, not CDs -- which I own. Are those illegal too because I don't own the CDs, just the LPs? Hmmmmmmmmm?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Alright. You almost had my sympathy all the way up to:
And let's not forget that Gnutella allows all kinds of information to be spread across the Internet. Not only illegal MP3s, but other illegal and immoral content - pornography, terrorist manifestos, race-hate propaganda and anti-Christian bigotry. How are we supposed to eradicate these blights when they are available over a distributed network of servers which is practically impossible to shut down?
Now, excuse me, but any time someone tries to impose their own morality upon me, it doubles my blood pressure. Not only is none of what you mentioned "illegal" but... Blights? BLIGHTS? To some of us, pornography is nothing short of a godsend. As for race-hate propaganda, terrorist manifestos, and anti-christian "bigotry," what are you worried about? I've read the Unabomber's Manifesto; it certainly didn't affect my opinion of technology and its importance to humanity as a whole. NO amount of propaganda or bigotry literature is going to change my mind about anything... and anyone whose mind it WOULD change was predisposed to that way of thinking already, and would have thought that even if they'd never seen the literature. I'm not racist, and I leave Christians alone if they leave me alone (my own parents are highly religious Baptists; we discuss religion now and then, but we never try to impose anything on each other. It's just discussion.) and I'm getting utterly sick of people bitching because they happened to see something that offended them and instead of just being offended and moving on, they feel they have to exact vengeance upon the "offender" by attacking him on the basis of "Think of the children! What about the children!" or something equally fucking ludicrous (screw "f*cking" or "fscking"; you can all handle seeing the actual word, all the protestations of zealots notwithstanding). But anyway....
This whole thing is just another example of a Giant Megacorp attempting to use its leverage and influence to protect its own interests ("money") at the expense of millions of people's enjoyment. This must stop, people. WE are the important ones here. WE have intrinsic rights that override any rights any corporation has. Since when did a pile of paper with "Inc." stamped on it become more important than someone listening to a song they downloaded over the internet? Or more important than the millions of people working in Asian sweat shops making 12 cents a day to manufacture all the material crap that ends up being sold at top-dollar here in the US but which is about as durable as an ice piston ring? It costs them about $15 to manufacture a DIMM memory stick of any capacity, yet how much do we pay for them? And how do we pay for them? By The MEG and Out The ASS. We're all tired of getting screwed over by companies who only care about their profits; but what can we do? What can we do...
Is there any hope for humanity? Any at all?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Ah, a personal attack already. We've gotten off to a bad start here, I see. First of all, Tibet's physical location is immaterial; it's a whole separate country that should be... well, wholly separate from China. The fact that China routinely harasses, arrests, tortures, and kills Tibetans just because of their religious beliefs and philosophies is what I was talking about... and you can't deny that. Secondly, I've often found that people who ignore the contents of a message and merely nit-pick the container it's in (bad grammar, spelling, punctuation; semantic differences that have no effect on the actual message, in other words) do so because they just like to bitch. Thirdly, do you really think the minor stockholders of a corporation have any say in whether that corporation will, for example, sue a competitor out of pure spite for, let's say, "patent" infringement because they can't attack the competitor on any other front and the competitor uses, ohhhh, a blatantly obvious "1-click" method of making customers' visits to their web site more convenient? A corporation has very very very few major stockholders and gajillions of minor ones. I myself "own" stock in the company for which I work, but do I have any say in its day-to-day affairs? Ha! I can't even get them to let me work 9 to 6 instead of 8:30 to 5:30! Your point is moot... we DO outnumber the decision-makers by a million to one.
Now for the founding fathers. Of course they weren't fraught with morals. Nobody is. But there's a reason that original federalist government and its laws didn't last; everyone realized it would make the US just like England, if not worse, so the continental congress decided to word the constitution, bill of rights, etc in such a way that it would protect the People from the government for all time. And it would have worked, too, if not for all the crap they're trying to do now with gun control laws, etc. The very first thing that Hitler did when he got in power in Germany was to disarm the population. Once that occurred, there was no way to stop him. Jesse Ventura (the governor of Minnesota, in case you've been under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears for the past year) put it rather well in a speech I saw last night (and I'm paraphrasing): "The 2nd amendment wasn't put there to protect your right to hunt things. It was the 1700's; you *had* to hunt and kill things just so you could eat. It was a given. No, the 2nd amendment was written to protect the people from an unjust and oppressive government... and now they're trying to take that away. I pray this gun legislation never gets enacted." I'm still in shock that any politician would say that in public, but it's the god's honest truth. If ever there was an honest politician, it's him, and his statement that his chances of running for president are "slim to none... more like none" just reinforces that belief. But anyway.
The founding fathers foresaw what would happen with government and built checks and balances into the Constitution to protect future generations from a government grown bloated and corrupt over time, which is of course inevitable since human nature isn't likely to change. Unless we let a superintelligent computer rule us, one without greed or fear or ignorance in its makeup, human nature will always lead to leaders who are always looking out for their own best interests instead of the interests of those they govern... and to me, that's just fscking sad. "What a piece of work is man......." sigh.
I sure hope people get to read this; it's kinda sad when slashdot posts get relegated to the "Older Stuff" box and are never looked at again.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:I'm not in the US. Why does DMCA matter to me?
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Certainly you are angry, even fighting mad. But violence is certainly not the answer.
Damn right. I abhor violence. Physical attacks are the most reprehensible thing humans do to each other. Wars, gang violence, shootings in high schools and churches... all of it sickens me to my core. I choose the route Gandhi chose: passive resistance. And, like him, I can't do a thing about it on my own. So, I either turn into a James Bond villain, or thousands of followers band together and passively resist with me...
I don't like the sound of it, of course. It'll be painful. But so are all births.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I'd love to show you a perpetual motion generator. And everyone else. But do you have any idea of the power that oil companies have over us (pun very intended)? People who've tried to go public with or get a patent for these types of generators have been bought out, killed, or never seen again. They've even done things like buying up the patents for carburetors that get over 200 miles to the gallon and then bury them to protect their profit margins. The only hope these generators have of getting into the public's 30-second-sound-bite-attention-span is if someone manufactures them, without a patent, for free, and distributes them, for free, in every Wal-Mart, Tru-Value, and Home Depot in Amerika... and even then, they'd probably be killed before they could succeed. No, if you had plans for one, and built it, and started charging the electric company for the power you put into the grid, you'd be killed too, and your generator would be melted into ashtrays or something. Even people in New Zealand have been harassed for decades by energy producing companies and the government itself (which is, of course, just a slave to the big money. Don't forget the Golden Rule: "He with all the gold makes all the rules.")
I promise you, the technology is out there. It was invented... err, "discovered," rather... over 100 years ago and has been suppressed ever since. Big Money controls ALL things on this planet; that's what needs to change. Someone earlier mentioned that the readily-apparent greed that corporations exhibit is just a reflection of the greed inside people. This is of course entirely accurate. What needs to change on this planet is human nature, not laws. But how do you do that? I wish I knew.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:I'm not in the US. Why does DMCA matter to me?
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Well; semantics.:) I'll concede the point... "The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
The same thing I thought of him before... heh. See, Edison did do some amazing things, and had some pretty cool and useful inventions; the light bulb, the phonograph, moving pictures, etc. But he was also very egotistical and kind of a jerk about it. His efforts to destroy A/C and Tesla were nothing short of pure evil, motivated only by his need to be the most important person alive. Thanks for reminding me of that...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:You really cannot do this with the current TCP/
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People dialing in from Toronto actually get an IP address down in the US. Now how would they actually know these people are in Canada?!
There are bound to be exceptions in this, as in everything. Just like it's possible for people in America to call an ISP in Mexico and thus make Swedish servers think they're not in the US. But then again... there is that Echelon thing... Of course, that's the government's and they'd never do anything to try to control our net access, would they?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Ahhhhh, god bless The Onion....... without it there would be so much less to laugh about. Anyway...
Something we all seem to appear guilty of here is pigeonholing. I'm not, and I believe you're not, saying that "all corporations are inherently evil." There are some damn fine companies that actually listen to the opinions of their employees, and take care not to sully the environment (Ben & Jerry's for example), and do nice things like same-sex partner benefits. But there are also companies where most of the employees are temps so they can justify not paying them as much. There are companies that (still!) dump toxic waste into duck ponds in parks at 3AM. There are companies that will fire you for sending a coworker a "Happy Birthday!" e-mail (IBM actually did this, by the way, a few years ago). So, like humans, SCSI cables, and witches in Oz, there are Good Ones and Bad Ones.
Now. Take a look back at early corporations, and tell me if you still feel the same way.
Yes. I do. Back then, yes, working conditions were hideous and your life expectancy was about 30 years, thanks to corporations. Nowadays, working conditions are not that bad, and your life expectancy is about 70-80 years, give or take, more or less, depending on how much internal combustion emissions, pesticides, and chicken infested with quick-growth hormones you ingest in your lifetime (why do you think "organically grown" vegetables and meat cost twice as much as that swill you get at your local Mega Grocery Concern?). It took massive protesting and strikes and whatnot to get them to listen the last few times; if it hadn't been for those brave downtrodden souls, conditions would still be just as bad because businesses just aren't set up to change themselves in a manner which will benefit others at its own cost. They have to be forced into respecting rights and things like clean water because they aren't people. A corporation is a great big pile of machinery and regulations and ownership deeds and a hive of employees, most of whom have no control over that to which they belong, in the same way that your alveoli have no control over whether you smoke or not... someone Way Up There In Charge decides "We will do this" and everyone below that level has no choice but to obey or... find another body to belong to. We just recently had to switch all our email from sendmail to Exchange (tm) just because the Chief Something-or-other Officer of the company got a wild hair up his ass about sharing calendars. Calendars! Isn't that the stupidest thing?? Here we are, with working sendmail and unix servers we can put any of a dozen calendar sharing packages on (or write our own), and what happens? We have to trash it all and replace it with garbage. But I digress. The point is, the companies do not get better on their own; they must be forced into it. It's war, ladies and gentlemen, and we (and our children) are the spoils.
Over 100 years ago, Nicola Tesla invented something that should have revolutionized the entire world. Well, he invented hundreds of things that did and didn't revolutionize the world, but this thing in particular sticks out very prominently. He invented an electrical generator that, for "fuel," used.... yes.... perpetual motion. You just give it a whirl, and it runs forever without fuel. So in other words, there never should have been any pollution. Never. No internal combustion. No coal-burning power plants. No refineries. No OPEC, for the love of god. Iraq should be just a bunch of sand, camels and religious fanatics. (I'm just being realistic.) And why, you ask, didn't this transpire? Standard Oil. Westinghouse. Edison. The Powers That Were. They systematically destroyed Tesla... and no, I don't mean George Westinghouse personally; he was dead by the time this happened. Tesla had given up most of his patents to George Westinghouse, who actually thought highly of Tesla and thought these patents would be profitable. They were, of course; the polyphase AC generator patent alone turned out to be worth trillions of dollars. Every generator today uses its basic design. But that's only because the other generator, the one that didn't use fuel, got buried after George died. Without his guidance, Tesla was forgotten. This utterly, completely brilliant man was swept under the rug of history, most of his inventions attributed to someone else. He died penniless and with a heart full of bitter resentment. To this DAY, even the Smithsonian Museum puts up exhibits of Tesla's inventions next to busts of Edison's head; revisionist history. To hear them talk, Edison invented AC power instead of being its bitterest enemy. Oh, my point, you ask? Sorry. If corporate greed in the form of Westinghouse Inc. hadn't sucked up Tesla and, through collusion with Standard Oil, buried the "free energy" patent so people would keep having to buy fuel instead of buying one generator and then never having to pay for fuel again, there would be no smog over Los Angeles. There would be no oil spills fouling the coast of Alaska. There would have been no Persian Gulf War. And you wouldn't right now be paying $1.65 per gallon for gas.
Westinghouse did everything it could to destroy Tesla... and the MPAA/RIAA/etc are doing everything they can do right now to destroy MP3s, free DVDs, and the free dissemination of information, entertainment, and educational materials. The clouds over the world today may not be darker than they were in the 1910's...... but they are most definitely still there, and they will never go away until we shoo them away ourselves. Everything changes, yes.... eventually.... but there is always a catalyst for that change, and the businesses themselves for damn sure ain't gonna be it.
And speaking of labor unions..... isn't it about time there was an Information Workers' Union to protect us from working 60-hour weeks and getting paid for 40 because we're "salaried"? Or something? Hey, if garment workers can have one...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Re:I'm not in the US. Why does DMCA matter to me?
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I have to agree... and I live in the US.
This used to be such a great country, up until about 1930. Then, THEY took over. I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the great depression or the "big crash" of 1929 or not, but that's about when everything started going to hell. Giant mega-corporations were in control of everything in the form of monopolies; US Steel, Standard Oil; Carnegie and Westinghouse and Rockefeller and a very few others. William Randolph Hearst managed to rile up so many people about marijuana that he got it illegalized rather easily. This is pretty common knowledge, but what isn't common knowledge is why. Hemp had been very very prized up to that point for its incredibly useful nature; there are World War I posters that proclaim "Hemp for victory!" to encourage people to grow hemp for fibers (rope, clothing, paper) and biomass to make fuel out of. Then Hearst came along and decided hemp was threatening his timber industry, so it had to go. THE single most useful plant on earth, and one asshole manages to destroy it in the minds of the idiot sheep of America just by spreading lies about it that nobody ever bothered to verify. It had nothing to do with its drug properties as he claimed; it had everything to do with his greed. It all goes to show that he who controls the media (Hearst was the newspaper baron at that time, controlling almost all media outlets) controls what is perceived by the sheep out there as "reality." And that's exactly what 99.999% of the population of the US is..... sheep who never do any research for themselves, preferring to let "someone else" do it so they have more time to sit on their asses watching TV and eating microwaved meals that are about as nutritious as molten wax. We as a country have lost our way and our sovreignty and our very souls to Big Business.
And this is just another prime example of the pure evil that are corporations these days. In fact, it's about the third one I've seen just this week... and it's only Wednesday. We average about one major violation of ethics, morality, law, or just plain old common courtesy per day in this country, and every time who's doing it? The RIAA. The MPAA. The CIA. The NSA. The WTO. The World Bank. The UN. One arm of the government or another. China (both in mainland China and Tibet). Everywhere you look, it's the same; mayhem and chaos propagated by the Elite Few against people without any possibility of being able to defend themselves physically, financially, spiritually, or emotionally. It's always the easy targets that get hit too; 16 year olds in Europe, small start-ups in Canada, some guy named Coolio who may or may not have been the Coolio, etc. As far as all these gluttonous companies are concerned, they take priority over us, our property, our money, our lives, our very existence... and it's just a matter of time before there's an upwelling, a rebellion, against them and their totalitarian crap.
Picture the US before it was the US. Mid-1700's. England still ruled the land with harsh, unjust taxes and imperial apathy; as long as the raw materials and other goods kept flowing from the west side of the Atlantic to the east side, England didn't care what it had to do to maintain the status quo. And what happened? People got tired of it. Sick to death of it. Back then, people weren't sheep; they were hardened veterans of life, bruised by years of labor to benefit someone they'd never even met. Bitter, resentful people. Even the landowners, the businessmen, hated England as much as the laborers. And they, being the hardened capable people that they were, did something about it, didn't they? The American Revolution was the result, and this country was wrested from England's greedy claws bit by bit until finally they couldn't hold on anymore. And here we are, 200+ years later, in exactly the same position, but under a slightly different bootheel.
What to do, what to do... Are we hardened enough to do whatever it takes to rid ourselves of the blight of corporatism in this country? Are we capable of a long protracted fight against all that is evil? After all, We the People outnumber Them, the Leashholders by about, ohhh, a million to one... the only way we can lose is by never bothering to fight. Admittedly, the way the system is set up now means that just about the only means at our disposal that would be effective are illegal by one definition or another, but... but dammit, I'm sick of being a part of a country.. nay, a species... that screws its own over just for a little more cash. I'm sick of human suffering being ignored (or even caused) by the governments of this planet. I'm sick of Big Money being the driving force behind the perpetuation of damn near everything that is wrong with the human race (organized religions being the other half of that particular equation), and I'm especially sick of feeling powerless to do anything about it. Because I, the individual, am powerless. You, the individual, whoever you are, are equally powerless. But in a more global, unified sense, just who are we?
Think about it. This is the Information Age. The entire WORLD runs on the machines that we invent, set up, operate, maintain, repair, and control. Do you think there are any chairmen of the board, or vice presidents of marketing, or deputy directors in the FBI, who know *anything* about computers, networking, the net, etc? Could your boss, even, go into a PIX firewall and re-enable port 80 so that The Roads Can Roll? Who here remembers Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"?
"Men make an arbitrary code, and because it is not right,
they try to make it prevail by might. The moral law does not want any champion. Its asserters do not go to war. It was never infringed with impunity."
"The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order, who observe the law when the government breaks it."
The more laws there are, especially laws that protect big business at the expense of the workers that (after all) support these businesses with the sweat of their brows and their proverbial strong backs, the less free we are as a people... not just America, but everywhere. And the longer we allow it to go on, the longer we're going to keep getting screwed by people like Jack Valenti (who is just a man, after all). I mean, why shouldn't we just go on letting the government put plutonium in us just to see what it does (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we let them do things like using human subjects as unwitting guinea pigs (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we.
Something has to be done... and fast, before they have obedience microchips implanted in our brains or something and we all become Financial Borg, helpless to do anything but service the collective... err, I mean, the powerholders of the world, our masters but for a little disobedience. It would be worth it just to get rid of all these insipid little animated banner ads on Slashdot and elsewhere, just sitting there sucking up my CPU and bandwidth for no reason (since I never look at them and probably nobody else on earth does now, either)...
I'll just sit here quietly now and wait for the Trilateral Commission's Black Ops Squad to come and pick me up.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Slashdot Mirror
I've never once had pico add anything to the end of a line unless it was a DOS-format file and then it just replaces carriage returns with linefeeds. I've also never seen vi break long lines. It's just a matter of ease of use; I find using ^K instead of "dd" easier to use to cut a line, and ^U to paste the lines that were cut somewhere else (I have yet to figure out how to cut & paste something with vi), ^R to read in a file, not having to hit a special key to get the keystroke commands, etc. pico is just plain easier.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
The major difference is that I already have 2,000 scripts with "" in them on about five different servers. The developers know to use BBEdit instead of Dreamweaver if the filename ends in .php or .phtml already, so there's no problem there. And besides; I'd rather suck out my own prostate than give in to the whims of programmers who refuse to give PHP as much respect as they do ASP (just search the Dreamweaver help system for "php", then search again for "asp" and compare the results).
Apache runs on over 60% of the world's websites. PHP runs on almost 1.5 million of those sites. The only people who use IIS/ASP/NT servers are big businesses who've been brainwashed into thinking they're more stable, reliable, robust, etc than Unix servers; all the rest of us know better. And some of us refuse to have any trace of any Microsoft product associated with their sites... :')
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
...and since it wasn't a REAL troll, and neither am I, I use pico. vi is not quite as bad as emacs in terms of usability, but it's close. I've yet to find a text editing task that was any easier in vi than in pico. Once you figure out how to keep the damn thing from breaking long lines wherever it feels like, pico rules...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
UGH!!!!!! Put ASP tags into a PHP script??? That's worse than Philip Glass selling out to Pepsi ads. There's no excuse for Dreamweaver destroying PHP tags; if it can recognize ASP delimiters, it can damn sure recognize PHP ones. Just because PHP supports using ASP tags instead doesn't mean I'm gonna go rewrite 2,000 scripts, anyway; I'd much rather use a cheaper HTML editor than pay money for something that's purposely designed to make life difficult for non-Microsoft-zombies...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I have to agree. I've never found it *necessary* to use ODBC for database access except when it has to be used with IIS and ASP (and thus a System DSN is needed). As I mentioned earlier, if a database has been designed and entered in Access or something foreign to all that is holy, export it to flat text and write a small PHP script to parse it and use MySQL calls to do the data entry. People who shop around for months for tools that will do these kinds of things never find what they're looking for; it's always best (and MUCH faster) to just write your own that's customized to your particular task at hand. If you can. If not, I charge $50 an hour... hehehehe...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Point them to a nice little box of Dreamweaver and pray they like it. (As it can play nice with PHP. :))
Every time the web developers here TOUCH one of my PHP scripts with Dreamweaver, it totally destroys it. It can't seem to get it through its little Microsoft-centric mind that not every ">" sign isn't part of an HTML tag... it takes damn near every "?>" and turns it into "<"... but, oh, does it work nicely with ASP.
Use Homesite, BBEdit, or some other plain text editor if you're going to play with PHP.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
As a plug for a favorite product, I'd suggest pointing the designers toward Visio2000 for database design...
And, lo and behold, coincidence of coincidences, Microsoft assimilated... I mean, "bought"... Visio. How long will it be before it'll only design MS SQL or Access databases? Hmmmmmmm.
Oh, not to mention the fact that you'll spend $900 for it.
You know how I design databases? On paper. I draw out everything the database will need, and then using (gasp!) pico, I proceed to write the structure...
...and then if need be, use a PHP script to do the data entry legwork for me. See how easy it is?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
How does M$.com stay up? It's very simple. They have a bank of servers, some doing work and some just sitting there doing nothing while waiting for the ones doing work to crash; when they do (and they will), the ones that are idle take over... thus, you get the illusion of stability when in fact, their servers are crashing all the time. In other words... IIS is great if you throw enough money at it, don't mind having a 24-hour crew of sysadmins running around hitting the reset buttons on the crashed servers all day every day, and don't mind having to buy twice as many servers as you would need with Apache.
By the way, I recently had need to port an Access database to MySQL, a big list of zip codes which was only distributed as an MDB file. I couldn't find any way to just export a SQL file to import directly into MySQL, so I exported the table as a tab-separated list. The latitudes and longitudes in the database are accurate to 6 decimal places; the ones it exported were only accurate to 3 decimal places, and there's no way to tell it "I want 6 decimal places, damn you." So after wasting hours playing with all the exporting options, I found that if you export it with the "Formatted Report" method, it DOES keep all six decimal places... so I just took that 12-meg file (it puts a line of data, a line of "--------", a line of data, a line of "-------", etc) and wrote a PHP script to parse it and directly insert the values into the database. Worked like a charm.
So you see, there are ways around Microsoft's half-assed programs... I mean, how hard would it be to have "Export as SQL" in the options? Just basic table row data entry is the simplest thing you can do in SQL; it's not like it would have to know whether it's Oracle or MS SQL Server or MySQL or Postgres, for god's sake...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Where'd you get the idea I said Elian's family should have used guns? As for "he should have been taken," he should have... his mother kidnapped him and transported him across the border to another country; the fact that she unfortunately died in the process doesn't change that. If an American mother had taken her child from its father and transported him across even state lines, she'd be a wanted fugitive; soon as she was caught, the child would be returned to its father. How is this any different? Because he's a cute little 5 year old Cuban boy? Please. I was criticizing the raid on their house not on the basis that they should have let the family keep him; it was on the basis that they went in and pepper-sprayed and tear-gassed everyone in the place with no reason. I'm surprised they didn't arrest them all on the spot, but there definitely was no need for chemical spraying; it's just highly demonstrative of the attitude prevalent in the government's enforcement agencies these days: "Rights? You have no rights."
And on to OK City. Read again the things I mentioned about that incident. Explosive devices found in the basement (the ones that *didn't* go off); history records "there was just one bomb in the truck," and that has become "truth" in spite of the fact that people have videotaped news reports stating otherwise. Eyewitnesses insisting there were two explosions close together, not just one as history now records as the "truth" -- also in direct contradiction to videotaped eyewitness testimony. The clear evidence of an outward explosion from within the building (just look at any photograph of the place). Their insistence that the whole building, chock-full of hard evidence, was bulldozed over before anything even approaching a full investigation was done. To me, the evidence that I have seen with my own eyes contradicts and makes impossible everything the government claimed in all of its statements about the event, whether via spokesperson on TV, or in a court of law under oath. But that's hardly surprising, I suppose; if Clinton can get away with perjury, they sure can...
And I don't carry a gun. But random strangers bent on mugging, harming, raping, or killing me don't know that. And if people carrying guns was the norm in this society, they would more than likely keep not knowing that... because they would be far less likely to tempt fate and find out for sure.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Your constitution was written in 1776 when there was a very real threat of a British reinvasion. Well guess what? I think the threat is over.
You need to reread Jefferson's letter. He clearly was not talking about the British when he wrote that.
Now, personally I hate guns. The best thing that could happen would be for all weapons to just suddenly vanish from Earth. But that's not very likely, is it? The cat is out of the bag, Pandora's box is open, there's no way (without a time machine) to get rid of them all. So the only other solution is for everyone to have them so that nobody has an advantage over anyone else. And what if there were no guns, anyway? People would use knives to hurt each other. And if there were no knives? They would throw rocks. No rocks? They'd use their fists. It is perfectly possible to kill someone using your bare hands, no weapons required. If these kids hadn't had access to guns, they would have found something else to retaliate with.
The real solution, the real and only truly lasting solution, is to remove the URGE to kill. Video games, no matter how violent they are, will never *CAUSE* someone to turn into a homicidal maniac. It would be just as valid to say "Well, all these kids who shoot people breathe oxygen; we need to remove oxygen from society to save the children!" Damn near every child in America has played video games; what percentage of them have then killed someone, too? I'll give you a hint: it's a DAMN small percentage. They kill because they were predisposed to killing, not because they played one too many games of Doom. They kill because they feel helpless to change things any other way. They kill because they have the Psychopath Gene. There are a thousand reasons someone might turn into a killer. Video games ain't one of them.
Let's look at the example of Australia. They banned guns a year or two ago. Since then, what has happened? Violent homicides are up over 300%. Why? Because nobody can PROTECT themselves anymore. What if EVERY kid in Columbine High School had been armed that day? Those two boys wouldn't have lasted 5 seconds after pulling out shotguns; they'd have been plastered to the wall by 500 rounds of ammunition shot by every OTHER kid in the place. It's likely nobody ELSE would have died at all!
Everyone says guns are "too accessible." There's no way to make them UNaccessible; if you ban them, there's always the black market. I say, guns aren't accessible enough. If every high school student was given a handgun and trained in how to use it, you would see a dramatic decline in school violence, bullying, and the general nastiness that kids indulge in. Throw a wolf into a flock of sheep and it'll gorge itself on defenseless flesh; give all the sheep guns, and the wolf doesn't stand a chance.
Think about it.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
AMEN!
It's very gratifying to see there are others out there with a clue. I was beginning to think I was the only one who realized that as soon as guns are outlawed and only outlaws have guns, the outlaws will be our only defense against the government corruption that has been running rampant in America almost since its inception.
History lesson: Hitler gains power in Germany and immediately disarms the population. How could the Jews defend themselves then?
People who say things like "Oh, the Second Amendment was only put there so people could hunt for food" are clueless morons. Hunting for your dinner with a rifle was a given back then... if you didn't shoot things, you didn't eat. The entire purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the population would always be able to defend itself against all enemies, FOREIGN OR DOMESTIC. A "domestic enemy" is one that attacks you from within... i.e., the government itself. And we, my friends, have been under attack for centuries.
Wake up, people. Stop believing everything you see on CNN. Let me give you an example: Elian Gonzalez. I saw, live, that pre-dawn raid on the home he was in. I agree that they should have returned him to his father, but not the way they did it. They went in and waved M-16's at everyone, grabbed the kid at gunpoint, and then on their way out, they sprayed everyone in the place with pepper spray and tear gas. You didn't see THAT on the reruns, did you? It only appeared on the LIVE footage and they never mentioned gas or sprays again... but they damn sure showed all the people that were in that house weeping their asses off, trying to give us the impression that they were just upset. Now, if CNN can twist the truth around like that in a case this simple, what's to prevent them from inventing the truth whenever it suits them?
Oh, still don't believe me? How about another example? Remember the Oklahoma City bombing? Sure, who doesn't? But how many people besides me saw it WHILE it was happening? That's the only time you can catch glimpses of the truth. EVERY eyewitness they interviewed said there were TWO blasts, two distinct and separate explosions separated by almost one second. And as if that wasn't enough, CNN itself was reporting that in addition to the truck bomb out in front of the place, they had found FOUR unexploded bombs strapped to the remaining support pillars in the basement! In other words, that truck bomb was a diversion, and the real damage had been done from WITHIN. If you look at the blast damage from just afterwards, it's VERY obvious that that building blew up From The Inside Out. Speculation continues as to what REALLY happened that day and who was really responsible. I'm sure Timothy McVeigh had something to do with it, but (just like Oswald) he and Terry McNichol were patsies. Ask yourselves, also, why they were in such a hurry to bulldoze the place and permanently destroy ALL evidence about anything that happened there? Their pitiful excuses of "It's to minimize everyone's bereavement; out of sight, out of mind" was just that -- a pitiful excuse.
My point? Never believe anything CNN tells you, including "Gun control is the answer to violence! Save the children -- Gun Control Now!" If you ever want to get something banned, just claim (whether true or not) that it threatens children, and if enough people hear and believe it, they'll clamor for its banning until the legislative bodies in question have no choice but to do so or be thrown out of office.
It wouldn't surprise me one bit if the US government was behind every assassination, every terrorist bombing, every school/church/nursing home shooting, and every other sneaky bit of nastiness in recent history. Not One Bit. Everything that's happened since about 1900 has seemed to be leading towards the government and/or Big Business being in control of All Things. How many of you knew that the US Constitution specifically says, in the Tenth Amendment, "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people"? Do you know what that means? That means that the STATES in the US are supposed to have more power than the federal government, and should be allowed to decide for themselves all things that aren't *specifically* granted to the Federal government in the constitution. Have you EVER seen the federal government exhibit that behavior? Nooooo. What they do is say "Okay; if you don't enact such-and-such a law, we'll cut off funding for, say, your highways." This is coercion, plain and simple. The federal government is no better than the Mafia telling a shop owner "Yeah, ya needs to pay us 'insurance' to make sure nothin' bad happens to ya..."
Go ahead. Call me a nut. They called Galileo a nut for saying the earth rotates around the sun. They called Columbus a nut for saying the earth was round. They called Louis Pasteur a nut for saying diseases were caused by tiny little invisible creatures that got inside your cells and did bad things. They called Orville and Wilbur Wright nuts for attempting to fly. They called Ben Franklin nuts for flying kites in lightning storms. But no matter how outrageous the claims, they were all right, weren't they?
In case anyone still doubts the opinions of the Founding Fathers and what they had in mind when they wrote the Constitution (and especially with regard to gun control), here's a quote from a letter Thomas Jefferson wrote to William Smith on the subject:
(You can find the whole letter here if you're interested.
Read that quote over and over and over until you understand it completely, and realize what he was saying. We have lost the "spirit of resistance." Our rulers believe us to be the sheep we are, and are taking advantage of it Right Now. Not a day goes by anymore that they don't take away one liberty or another from us, because we LET them take them away. Do we have the courage to "set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them"? Thomas Jefferson knew the truth. The rest of the founding fathers knew the truth too. But somewhere between then and now, something happened and everyone forgot history... so now, we're repeating it, presumably until we get it right.
Let's get it right this time, people... Think Of The Children! :-)
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
This could not possibly have "slipped by" code reviewers. You cannot miss something like that key phrase sticking out like that, I don't care how tired you are. The only reason that DLL made it into the final release is because the higher-ups WANTED IT THERE. They KNEW about it, they AUTHORIZED it, and they damn sure aren't going to fire anyone over it unless some VP decides they need a patsy. Their source code may be closed to all of us out here in the bleachers, but internally their engineers would have been all OVER that in a heartbeat... IF they weren't being told to put it in in the first place.
I will never trust a Microsoft product again.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Nobody got me... :) It didn't matter if it was a troll or not, because there are people out there who do think like that and they need to be taught the reasons why the way they feel is wrong. Education is the key to our eventually winning this war against MS and all that it stands for; the post I was responding to was just a handy vehicle for the dissemination of truth.
Fight the power! Thank you. heh.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Erm... I'm sorry, but I have to reply to this one. I'll try not to flame... really...
If you linux users could ONLY connect to the internet like good win9x users you wouldn't need a secure OS.
Anything that connects to the internet has to be secure these days. You just try hooking your Win95/98/00 machine up with a cable modem for more than 6 hours without getting hack attempts from all over the world. If you leave Netbios ports open and have file/print sharing turned on, you might as well just buy a billboard ad along any major freeway and put your machine name, IP address, and administrator password on it. And guess what? Windows (all varieties, all versions) comes with all that crap enabled BY DEFAULT! Yes, MICROS~1 wants your machine to be as secure as a dollar bill blowing gently down a busy sidewalk; there's no other reason why they'd do that.
Windows hardly ever has a problem or a glitch
Okay, now, I know this has to be a troll... it's just too obviously wrong and too easily disproven. Just ask anyone who experiences the BSOD on a daily basis...
that linux version of McAffe-another 3l33t company-only protects again two virii, the Windows version protects against thousands-- what does that tell you huh?
It tells me that a virus running on Linux has as much chance of propagating itself as a really ugly nun. Unless you do everything as root, and run things without knowing what they are AS root, and are just basically an idiot, a virus cannot do much to you... hence, there just aren't that many for Mc3l33t to protect you from.
Windows... isn't near as hard to fix as a Mac...
You've obviously never used a Mac. I have to support and administer them on a daily basis, and trust me; they are just as unreliable and unstable as Windows.
Windows... doesn't require a PHD level education to administer.
Given the number of Windows boxes out there with port 139 open to the entire world (that's your Netbios/File sharing port, by the way), it must take some level of intelligence/education beyond what almost everyone on earth has. At least Linux doesn't install all of its services defaulted to "allow complete strangers in without a password." At least Linux isn't susceptible to virii unless you're an idiot. At least Linux doesn't crash 12 times a day because of all the OS memory leaks and bad file management. At least Linux doesn't cost you a few days' salary. At least Linux doesn't hide any dirty little secrets in its source code. And, at least Linux isn't limited because it's being made by developers who care more about their paychecks and keeping God Mother Bill happy than they do about making something that works, doesn't stifle competition, and doesn't destroy standards in a desperate attempt to be The Most Important and Profitable Thing in the Universe.
Get a current OS, one marked 2000 from a company you can trust...
The last stable Linux version (v2.2.14) has a date stamp of 2000-01-04 19:40 UTC (that's 2:40 PM EST on January 4th, 2000, for the geek-challenged). The latest beta version is from March 24th, 2000, and the latest alpha test version is from yesterday. Can Windows 2000 claim upgrades anywhere near that recent? Last I checked, there are still many many bugs, and no fixes for them. As for trust... I trust an international, non-monetarily- or politically-motivated group of developers who develop things because they LIKE to more than I trust a bunch of copycat programmers who take 5-year-old Windows code and the best ideas of Unix, put a prettier GUI on it, call it "innovation" instead of "assimilation," change world-accepted standards just enough to break everything except Windows platforms, and sell it at a 10,000% profit. Did you know that Windows NT(r) was developed by taking VMS (oh look; 60's technology!) and porting it to the x86 architecture? Did you? Did you know MS hired the guy who originally made VMS to turn it into NT(r)? Hmmm?
So hot grits to you too! Thank you.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Now, now. Don't think that just because our "leaders" here in America are clueless, insane, greedy, bloody idiots that the rest of us are, too. Too often that's the case; guilt by association just doesn't cut it when you're talking about 260,000,000 people being led... err, manipulated... by a few hundred, who are themselves being led by a few tens, who are being led by their own greed and misguided "self-preservation" instincts. Those with the power make the rules. Money is power. And power corrupts. Draw your own conclusions.... :)
This is an attitude that is far too prevalent in the world. We barely even get to choose who leads our political world, and have no choice over who leads the financial world, yet many citizens of other countries always pigeonhole every American alive into this "Asshole" category that simply doesn't apply to the vast majority of us -- either because we just aren't assholes, or because we don't have enough power to be assholes. Believe me, if I, or any of the other tens of millions of us who aren't assholes, were in charge, had some power, things would be vastly different. I wonder how I can get myself initiated into the Bilderbergs... now that's power.
So all you terrorists who attack innocent US citizens who just happen to be in, say, Libya are doing nothing that will harm those who are your real targets; all you're doing is taking innocent lives and greatly increasing your chances of being a cockroach in your next few lives. All you people who speak out against "Americans" instead of "greedy capitalists" don't see the full picture; it is not Americans who are grinding you under their bootheels. It is the Nelson Rockefellers, the Bill Klintons, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization who are your real enemies. Fight them... not us.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Yes! Yes!!! Thank You!!!
Sorry... but speaking as one who spent a vast amount of time making such "compilation tapes," it amazes me that I'd forgotten all about them during this hoopla. Yeah, yeah, I know, radio stations pay the record labels for every song they play (pfffft) and that's why it's different........ yeah, yeah....... They're just not happy unless they're bitching about something.
By the way.... you know, I have a lot of MP3s I downloaded that are actually on albums -- that's "vinyl," kiddies, not CDs -- which I own. Are those illegal too because I don't own the CDs, just the LPs? Hmmmmmmmmm?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Alright. You almost had my sympathy all the way up to:
And let's not forget that Gnutella allows all kinds of information to be spread across the Internet. Not only illegal MP3s, but other illegal and immoral content - pornography, terrorist manifestos, race-hate propaganda and anti-Christian bigotry. How are we supposed to eradicate these blights when they are available over a distributed network of servers which is practically impossible to shut down?
Now, excuse me, but any time someone tries to impose their own morality upon me, it doubles my blood pressure. Not only is none of what you mentioned "illegal" but... Blights? BLIGHTS? To some of us, pornography is nothing short of a godsend. As for race-hate propaganda, terrorist manifestos, and anti-christian "bigotry," what are you worried about? I've read the Unabomber's Manifesto; it certainly didn't affect my opinion of technology and its importance to humanity as a whole. NO amount of propaganda or bigotry literature is going to change my mind about anything... and anyone whose mind it WOULD change was predisposed to that way of thinking already, and would have thought that even if they'd never seen the literature. I'm not racist, and I leave Christians alone if they leave me alone (my own parents are highly religious Baptists; we discuss religion now and then, but we never try to impose anything on each other. It's just discussion.) and I'm getting utterly sick of people bitching because they happened to see something that offended them and instead of just being offended and moving on, they feel they have to exact vengeance upon the "offender" by attacking him on the basis of "Think of the children! What about the children!" or something equally fucking ludicrous (screw "f*cking" or "fscking"; you can all handle seeing the actual word, all the protestations of zealots notwithstanding). But anyway....
This whole thing is just another example of a Giant Megacorp attempting to use its leverage and influence to protect its own interests ("money") at the expense of millions of people's enjoyment. This must stop, people. WE are the important ones here. WE have intrinsic rights that override any rights any corporation has. Since when did a pile of paper with "Inc." stamped on it become more important than someone listening to a song they downloaded over the internet? Or more important than the millions of people working in Asian sweat shops making 12 cents a day to manufacture all the material crap that ends up being sold at top-dollar here in the US but which is about as durable as an ice piston ring? It costs them about $15 to manufacture a DIMM memory stick of any capacity, yet how much do we pay for them? And how do we pay for them? By The MEG and Out The ASS. We're all tired of getting screwed over by companies who only care about their profits; but what can we do? What can we do...
Is there any hope for humanity? Any at all?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Tibet is in Mainland China, fool.
Ah, a personal attack already. We've gotten off to a bad start here, I see. First of all, Tibet's physical location is immaterial; it's a whole separate country that should be... well, wholly separate from China. The fact that China routinely harasses, arrests, tortures, and kills Tibetans just because of their religious beliefs and philosophies is what I was talking about... and you can't deny that. Secondly, I've often found that people who ignore the contents of a message and merely nit-pick the container it's in (bad grammar, spelling, punctuation; semantic differences that have no effect on the actual message, in other words) do so because they just like to bitch. Thirdly, do you really think the minor stockholders of a corporation have any say in whether that corporation will, for example, sue a competitor out of pure spite for, let's say, "patent" infringement because they can't attack the competitor on any other front and the competitor uses, ohhhh, a blatantly obvious "1-click" method of making customers' visits to their web site more convenient? A corporation has very very very few major stockholders and gajillions of minor ones. I myself "own" stock in the company for which I work, but do I have any say in its day-to-day affairs? Ha! I can't even get them to let me work 9 to 6 instead of 8:30 to 5:30! Your point is moot... we DO outnumber the decision-makers by a million to one.
Now for the founding fathers. Of course they weren't fraught with morals. Nobody is. But there's a reason that original federalist government and its laws didn't last; everyone realized it would make the US just like England, if not worse, so the continental congress decided to word the constitution, bill of rights, etc in such a way that it would protect the People from the government for all time. And it would have worked, too, if not for all the crap they're trying to do now with gun control laws, etc. The very first thing that Hitler did when he got in power in Germany was to disarm the population. Once that occurred, there was no way to stop him. Jesse Ventura (the governor of Minnesota, in case you've been under a rock on Mars with your fingers in your ears for the past year) put it rather well in a speech I saw last night (and I'm paraphrasing): "The 2nd amendment wasn't put there to protect your right to hunt things. It was the 1700's; you *had* to hunt and kill things just so you could eat. It was a given. No, the 2nd amendment was written to protect the people from an unjust and oppressive government... and now they're trying to take that away. I pray this gun legislation never gets enacted." I'm still in shock that any politician would say that in public, but it's the god's honest truth. If ever there was an honest politician, it's him, and his statement that his chances of running for president are "slim to none... more like none" just reinforces that belief. But anyway.
The founding fathers foresaw what would happen with government and built checks and balances into the Constitution to protect future generations from a government grown bloated and corrupt over time, which is of course inevitable since human nature isn't likely to change. Unless we let a superintelligent computer rule us, one without greed or fear or ignorance in its makeup, human nature will always lead to leaders who are always looking out for their own best interests instead of the interests of those they govern... and to me, that's just fscking sad. "What a piece of work is man......." sigh.
I sure hope people get to read this; it's kinda sad when slashdot posts get relegated to the "Older Stuff" box and are never looked at again.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Certainly you are angry, even fighting mad. But violence is certainly not the answer.
Damn right. I abhor violence. Physical attacks are the most reprehensible thing humans do to each other. Wars, gang violence, shootings in high schools and churches... all of it sickens me to my core. I choose the route Gandhi chose: passive resistance. And, like him, I can't do a thing about it on my own. So, I either turn into a James Bond villain, or thousands of followers band together and passively resist with me...
I don't like the sound of it, of course. It'll be painful. But so are all births.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I'd love to show you a perpetual motion generator. And everyone else. But do you have any idea of the power that oil companies have over us (pun very intended)? People who've tried to go public with or get a patent for these types of generators have been bought out, killed, or never seen again. They've even done things like buying up the patents for carburetors that get over 200 miles to the gallon and then bury them to protect their profit margins. The only hope these generators have of getting into the public's 30-second-sound-bite-attention-span is if someone manufactures them, without a patent, for free, and distributes them, for free, in every Wal-Mart, Tru-Value, and Home Depot in Amerika... and even then, they'd probably be killed before they could succeed. No, if you had plans for one, and built it, and started charging the electric company for the power you put into the grid, you'd be killed too, and your generator would be melted into ashtrays or something. Even people in New Zealand have been harassed for decades by energy producing companies and the government itself (which is, of course, just a slave to the big money. Don't forget the Golden Rule: "He with all the gold makes all the rules.")
I promise you, the technology is out there. It was invented... err, "discovered," rather... over 100 years ago and has been suppressed ever since. Big Money controls ALL things on this planet; that's what needs to change. Someone earlier mentioned that the readily-apparent greed that corporations exhibit is just a reflection of the greed inside people. This is of course entirely accurate. What needs to change on this planet is human nature, not laws. But how do you do that? I wish I knew.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Well; semantics. :) I'll concede the point...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
now what do you think of the inventor?
The same thing I thought of him before... heh. See, Edison did do some amazing things, and had some pretty cool and useful inventions; the light bulb, the phonograph, moving pictures, etc. But he was also very egotistical and kind of a jerk about it. His efforts to destroy A/C and Tesla were nothing short of pure evil, motivated only by his need to be the most important person alive. Thanks for reminding me of that...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
People dialing in from Toronto actually get an IP address down in the US. Now how would they actually know these people are in Canada?!
There are bound to be exceptions in this, as in everything. Just like it's possible for people in America to call an ISP in Mexico and thus make Swedish servers think they're not in the US. But then again... there is that Echelon thing... Of course, that's the government's and they'd never do anything to try to control our net access, would they?
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
Ahhhhh, god bless The Onion....... without it there would be so much less to laugh about. Anyway...
Something we all seem to appear guilty of here is pigeonholing. I'm not, and I believe you're not, saying that "all corporations are inherently evil." There are some damn fine companies that actually listen to the opinions of their employees, and take care not to sully the environment (Ben & Jerry's for example), and do nice things like same-sex partner benefits. But there are also companies where most of the employees are temps so they can justify not paying them as much. There are companies that (still!) dump toxic waste into duck ponds in parks at 3AM. There are companies that will fire you for sending a coworker a "Happy Birthday!" e-mail (IBM actually did this, by the way, a few years ago). So, like humans, SCSI cables, and witches in Oz, there are Good Ones and Bad Ones.
Now. Take a look back at early corporations, and tell me if you still feel the same way.
Yes. I do. Back then, yes, working conditions were hideous and your life expectancy was about 30 years, thanks to corporations. Nowadays, working conditions are not that bad, and your life expectancy is about 70-80 years, give or take, more or less, depending on how much internal combustion emissions, pesticides, and chicken infested with quick-growth hormones you ingest in your lifetime (why do you think "organically grown" vegetables and meat cost twice as much as that swill you get at your local Mega Grocery Concern?). It took massive protesting and strikes and whatnot to get them to listen the last few times; if it hadn't been for those brave downtrodden souls, conditions would still be just as bad because businesses just aren't set up to change themselves in a manner which will benefit others at its own cost. They have to be forced into respecting rights and things like clean water because they aren't people. A corporation is a great big pile of machinery and regulations and ownership deeds and a hive of employees, most of whom have no control over that to which they belong, in the same way that your alveoli have no control over whether you smoke or not... someone Way Up There In Charge decides "We will do this" and everyone below that level has no choice but to obey or... find another body to belong to. We just recently had to switch all our email from sendmail to Exchange (tm) just because the Chief Something-or-other Officer of the company got a wild hair up his ass about sharing calendars. Calendars! Isn't that the stupidest thing?? Here we are, with working sendmail and unix servers we can put any of a dozen calendar sharing packages on (or write our own), and what happens? We have to trash it all and replace it with garbage. But I digress. The point is, the companies do not get better on their own; they must be forced into it. It's war, ladies and gentlemen, and we (and our children) are the spoils.
Over 100 years ago, Nicola Tesla invented something that should have revolutionized the entire world. Well, he invented hundreds of things that did and didn't revolutionize the world, but this thing in particular sticks out very prominently. He invented an electrical generator that, for "fuel," used.... yes.... perpetual motion. You just give it a whirl, and it runs forever without fuel. So in other words, there never should have been any pollution. Never. No internal combustion. No coal-burning power plants. No refineries. No OPEC, for the love of god. Iraq should be just a bunch of sand, camels and religious fanatics. (I'm just being realistic.) And why, you ask, didn't this transpire? Standard Oil. Westinghouse. Edison. The Powers That Were. They systematically destroyed Tesla... and no, I don't mean George Westinghouse personally; he was dead by the time this happened. Tesla had given up most of his patents to George Westinghouse, who actually thought highly of Tesla and thought these patents would be profitable. They were, of course; the polyphase AC generator patent alone turned out to be worth trillions of dollars. Every generator today uses its basic design. But that's only because the other generator, the one that didn't use fuel, got buried after George died. Without his guidance, Tesla was forgotten. This utterly, completely brilliant man was swept under the rug of history, most of his inventions attributed to someone else. He died penniless and with a heart full of bitter resentment. To this DAY, even the Smithsonian Museum puts up exhibits of Tesla's inventions next to busts of Edison's head; revisionist history. To hear them talk, Edison invented AC power instead of being its bitterest enemy. Oh, my point, you ask? Sorry. If corporate greed in the form of Westinghouse Inc. hadn't sucked up Tesla and, through collusion with Standard Oil, buried the "free energy" patent so people would keep having to buy fuel instead of buying one generator and then never having to pay for fuel again, there would be no smog over Los Angeles. There would be no oil spills fouling the coast of Alaska. There would have been no Persian Gulf War. And you wouldn't right now be paying $1.65 per gallon for gas.
Westinghouse did everything it could to destroy Tesla... and the MPAA/RIAA/etc are doing everything they can do right now to destroy MP3s, free DVDs, and the free dissemination of information, entertainment, and educational materials. The clouds over the world today may not be darker than they were in the 1910's...... but they are most definitely still there, and they will never go away until we shoo them away ourselves. Everything changes, yes.... eventually.... but there is always a catalyst for that change, and the businesses themselves for damn sure ain't gonna be it.
And speaking of labor unions..... isn't it about time there was an Information Workers' Union to protect us from working 60-hour weeks and getting paid for 40 because we're "salaried"? Or something? Hey, if garment workers can have one...
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."
I have to agree... and I live in the US.
This used to be such a great country, up until about 1930. Then, THEY took over. I'm not sure if it had anything to do with the great depression or the "big crash" of 1929 or not, but that's about when everything started going to hell. Giant mega-corporations were in control of everything in the form of monopolies; US Steel, Standard Oil; Carnegie and Westinghouse and Rockefeller and a very few others. William Randolph Hearst managed to rile up so many people about marijuana that he got it illegalized rather easily. This is pretty common knowledge, but what isn't common knowledge is why. Hemp had been very very prized up to that point for its incredibly useful nature; there are World War I posters that proclaim "Hemp for victory!" to encourage people to grow hemp for fibers (rope, clothing, paper) and biomass to make fuel out of. Then Hearst came along and decided hemp was threatening his timber industry, so it had to go. THE single most useful plant on earth, and one asshole manages to destroy it in the minds of the idiot sheep of America just by spreading lies about it that nobody ever bothered to verify. It had nothing to do with its drug properties as he claimed; it had everything to do with his greed. It all goes to show that he who controls the media (Hearst was the newspaper baron at that time, controlling almost all media outlets) controls what is perceived by the sheep out there as "reality." And that's exactly what 99.999% of the population of the US is..... sheep who never do any research for themselves, preferring to let "someone else" do it so they have more time to sit on their asses watching TV and eating microwaved meals that are about as nutritious as molten wax. We as a country have lost our way and our sovreignty and our very souls to Big Business.
And this is just another prime example of the pure evil that are corporations these days. In fact, it's about the third one I've seen just this week... and it's only Wednesday. We average about one major violation of ethics, morality, law, or just plain old common courtesy per day in this country, and every time who's doing it? The RIAA. The MPAA. The CIA. The NSA. The WTO. The World Bank. The UN. One arm of the government or another. China (both in mainland China and Tibet). Everywhere you look, it's the same; mayhem and chaos propagated by the Elite Few against people without any possibility of being able to defend themselves physically, financially, spiritually, or emotionally. It's always the easy targets that get hit too; 16 year olds in Europe, small start-ups in Canada, some guy named Coolio who may or may not have been the Coolio, etc. As far as all these gluttonous companies are concerned, they take priority over us, our property, our money, our lives, our very existence... and it's just a matter of time before there's an upwelling, a rebellion, against them and their totalitarian crap.
Picture the US before it was the US. Mid-1700's. England still ruled the land with harsh, unjust taxes and imperial apathy; as long as the raw materials and other goods kept flowing from the west side of the Atlantic to the east side, England didn't care what it had to do to maintain the status quo. And what happened? People got tired of it. Sick to death of it. Back then, people weren't sheep; they were hardened veterans of life, bruised by years of labor to benefit someone they'd never even met. Bitter, resentful people. Even the landowners, the businessmen, hated England as much as the laborers. And they, being the hardened capable people that they were, did something about it, didn't they? The American Revolution was the result, and this country was wrested from England's greedy claws bit by bit until finally they couldn't hold on anymore. And here we are, 200+ years later, in exactly the same position, but under a slightly different bootheel.
What to do, what to do... Are we hardened enough to do whatever it takes to rid ourselves of the blight of corporatism in this country? Are we capable of a long protracted fight against all that is evil? After all, We the People outnumber Them, the Leashholders by about, ohhh, a million to one... the only way we can lose is by never bothering to fight. Admittedly, the way the system is set up now means that just about the only means at our disposal that would be effective are illegal by one definition or another, but... but dammit, I'm sick of being a part of a country.. nay, a species... that screws its own over just for a little more cash. I'm sick of human suffering being ignored (or even caused) by the governments of this planet. I'm sick of Big Money being the driving force behind the perpetuation of damn near everything that is wrong with the human race (organized religions being the other half of that particular equation), and I'm especially sick of feeling powerless to do anything about it. Because I, the individual, am powerless. You, the individual, whoever you are, are equally powerless. But in a more global, unified sense, just who are we?
Think about it. This is the Information Age. The entire WORLD runs on the machines that we invent, set up, operate, maintain, repair, and control. Do you think there are any chairmen of the board, or vice presidents of marketing, or deputy directors in the FBI, who know *anything* about computers, networking, the net, etc? Could your boss, even, go into a PIX firewall and re-enable port 80 so that The Roads Can Roll? Who here remembers Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience"?
The more laws there are, especially laws that protect big business at the expense of the workers that (after all) support these businesses with the sweat of their brows and their proverbial strong backs, the less free we are as a people... not just America, but everywhere. And the longer we allow it to go on, the longer we're going to keep getting screwed by people like Jack Valenti (who is just a man, after all). I mean, why shouldn't we just go on letting the government put plutonium in us just to see what it does (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we let them do things like using human subjects as unwitting guinea pigs (read about it!)? Why shouldn't we.
Something has to be done... and fast, before they have obedience microchips implanted in our brains or something and we all become Financial Borg, helpless to do anything but service the collective... err, I mean, the powerholders of the world, our masters but for a little disobedience. It would be worth it just to get rid of all these insipid little animated banner ads on Slashdot and elsewhere, just sitting there sucking up my CPU and bandwidth for no reason (since I never look at them and probably nobody else on earth does now, either)...
I'll just sit here quietly now and wait for the Trilateral Commission's Black Ops Squad to come and pick me up.
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness."